Merry Christmas!
In this special time I wanted to wish everyone all the best in the coming year. If you're feeling down, I hope better things are especially coming your way! If you celebrate with family, I wish you a lovely reunion time with the ones you cherish. If you spend that time alone, treat yourself to something nice, sit back and relax~
I'm not great at wishes so I hope it turned out well enough!
Anyway, it's been a decent year for Requiem For a Lost World and I want to sincerely thank everyone that stuck around, and the new arrivals as well. It's only thanks to your feedback that I've been able to make the game much better than it was a year ago. Your engagement with the title helped me push forward too; as much as I like working on this little passion project of mine, I probably would have given up by now if it weren't for the few of you that showed your support.
Be it comments, direct messages, suggestions or reviews. All of them kept me motivated.
I've also experienced how difficult and different it is to work as a game developer and all the things surrounding it, because it's rough out there (●'◡'●)
With all that - a heartfelt thank you, and I hope you stick around for a while longer!
On other news, version 2.0 will have to be delayed further. I apologize for the long wait! I could split this patch into parts, but even then it will take a bit more time to get the current version out.
On the bright side, version 2.0 is available on the preview branch so you can play it right now, but it's still a bit rough and the save file is incompatible between 1.9 and 2.0, so your progress will carry over into the new save format at first, but then it is saved separately between these versions!
So the reason for the delay is not me being lazy this time; it's just the scope that got out of hand. Between the new map that I have scrapped and remade a few times already, the new graphics that required optimizations, adding polish to the interfaces and new weapons - it just eats a lot of time.
I moved the changelog to the wiki so I can update it live as I complete features. You can see it here if you are interested in seeing the full changes. It also contains most of the changes from before the Steam release as well, which is pretty cool
Anyway, I think you guys deserve some screenshots to break the wall of text above. Some of them were taken in a different order, so don't mind slight visual differences.
Double sided characters
This is where most of my development time went into, but it was also the biggest pain point I've seen surrounding the game. It's still 2D, but at least you have the view from the back now.
Every character has a front and back view, as well as idle and walking animations. I could do a side view, and I might, but at this point it's better to just have 3D models.
However, I hope this is a good enough change for now. Let me know what you think.
Since this change forced me to touch the sprites, I also went ahead and remade all the past character sprites as well. Here is just one example
Forbidden Zone
I didn't post any screenshots last time, but I'm sure this is the final terrain, so here is a screenshot. It's still a bit empty since I'm still working on various points of interest
Darker grass
I also adjusted the brightness of the grass; it's no longer blinding to look at and blends nicely with the environment
New Recollection result screen
I've also gone back to redesign it a bit. The rewards are also altered to give more relics. I think it looks pretty good now. The pull animation for each character is planned, but I have to test the tools for that first
There are other minor changes like menu animations - some list entries will get larger when hovered over, menu windows will fade between each other, but it's better to experience than watch a gif.
That's all I have for you today. Unfortunately, no Christmas event this time around for obvious reasons. Hopefully I will get to do more themed events in 2026 though!